


Live Fast Die Young

by waketosleep



Category: Good Girls (TV)
Genre: Attempted Murder, Episode Tag, Episode: s01e10 Remix, F/M, Gen, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 07:12:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15262158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waketosleep/pseuds/waketosleep
Summary: Coda to the season 1 finale cliffhanger.Beth pulls the trigger. It's both an end and a beginning.





	Live Fast Die Young

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I've been awake forrrrr 41 hours. I spent some of them binging Good Girls. And some of them writing this. And a bunch of them at work.
> 
> The title is from Bad Girls by MIA.

"So, what you think?"

Beth can barely hear him over the blood pounding in her ears.

"You got what it takes?"

Real guns are heavier than she expected. It helps keep the barrel from shaking quite as hard as the rest of her.

She pulls the trigger, pre-emptively wincing at the noise it's going to make in this enclosed space--in her _dining room_.

But there's no bang. There's no recoil. There's a click. She squeezes the trigger again.

 _Click._ And now she can see that's the--the slide, the hammer, whatever, maybe this is one of those guns where it's both of those things at once.

She watched him pull on that part before he slid his gold-plated hand cannon across her Pier One dining room table. Chambering a round. The son of a bitch chambered a round of _air_.

She lowers the gun, tilting it a little towards herself to examine it with a frown as if it's defective, even though she knows exactly what's happened here. It's like a reflex. She's moving on autopilot.

Rio lets out a huff of laughter. He sounds a tiny bit impressed, a shade disbelieving. " _Damn_ , June Cleaver, I gotta say, you surprised me a little that you did it."

Beth slams his empty gun down hard on the ledge of her china cabinet, within her reach and outside of his. He probably still has the bullets in his pocket or something; she's not going to risk it. He probably has another gun on him somewhere, she realizes belatedly.

"Can't be that surprising, if you made sure there were no bullets in it before you gave it to me," she spits back. She spreads her hands at her sides, a sharp and violent motion. _Look at me,_ it says. "So did I pass your little test or what?"

His smirk shows a glint of teeth. Her fury feels like it's burning her up from the inside out. "Definitely an A for effort. I'll admit, I was interested to see if you were ready to cross that line yet." He pauses, bites his lip for a heartbeat like he's trying not to laugh. "And to see which one of us you were gonna point it at."

With a heroic effort, Beth breaks their eye contact and forces herself to look over at Dean. To acknowledge him. His expression's been frozen in place throughout their back-and-forth. Even though he's got one eye swollen almost shut, his face is still easy to read. He's surprised, disbelieving. Stricken.

When she makes eye contact it's like some kind of reverse-Medusa effect: he springs back to life all of a sudden, and then he erupts.

"Are you _kidding me_? Are you fucking _kidding me_ , Beth?"

Her rage has frozen over now. His words make frost snap through her heart; she is dark, cold, forbidding ice. She stares down his indignant face without blinking.

"I wish I'd asked you that when you told me you had cancer."

Even the blooming red bruises on Dean's poor, abused, dumb face seem to go pale as her words sink in. She pictures them like icicles lancing through his vulnerable spots. Heart. Lungs. Dick.

Rio is watching all this like he's at Wimbledon. At least he's smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

Dean is reaching for words. "I--Bethy, I--"

Beth leans over the table and fixes Dean with the same wide-eyed, quietly threatening look she used to use on Annie for trespassing in her room. "Get out," she says flatly.

The stricken look returns.

"You don't belong here," she says, and doesn't stop to examine too closely whether she means _You don't belong in this conflict_ or _You don't belong in this house_. At the moment, she doesn't particularly care how he chooses to take it. She just wants him gone.

And yet he's still making that face at her and she can practically see the wheels turning in his head, as he tries to think of something to say that could possibly fix any of this.

" _Dean_ ," she says, exasperation creeping into her tone. "For once in your _fucking_ life, do the smart thing. Leave."

There is a profound silence. Beth is leaning down over the table and staring daggers at Dean, her nails starting to dig into the wood with her growing impatience. Rio is sitting back in his chair a little, with a smug, contemplative look on his face and his arms crossed over his chest like he can't wait to see what happens next. Dean is sitting ramrod-straight in his seat, fidgeting nervously and looking back and forth between Beth, Rio, and the back door. They could be in a painting. They might all be holding their breath; it feels like that kind of moment.

Then a tattooed hand snakes into her peripheral vision, sets something on the table with a quiet _clink_ , and withdraws. Beth glances at the thing almost reflexively.

It's a bullet.

Dean breathes in sharply and then is up and out the back door so fast his chair wobbles and nearly crashes onto the floor. The sudden movement makes the bullet tip over and roll across the table, right in front of Beth. She scoops it up and holds it up between finger and thumb to examine it closely. She's only one long stride from the gun she slapped down on the china cabinet (she probably chipped the varnish, too; her furniture's certainly suffered from this lifestyle change). She pictures the tableau for a second: diving over to it, somehow getting this bullet into the chamber and then giving Rio a taste of his own medicine. Then she thinks about how he won't even blink, he'll just pull another gun out of the back of his pants or something and make another smarmy comment about her not thinking things all the way through. And that gun will have all the bullets still in it.

She twists to perch on the edge of the table instead, half-facing Rio and just out of arm's reach, for now.

The silence is more comfortable now, which itself makes her a little bit uncomfortable. Rio just leans back in his chair and sits there watching her with his eyes half-closed, staring at her cleavage or looking for some telltale bulge of weapons (or wires) stashed under her clothes, or maybe just watching her rolling the bullet casing back and forth between her finger and thumb as she contemplates the gold shine of it in the light coming from the sitting room.

Rio finally breaks it; apparently he's reached his limit of how long he can go without being the centre of attention. "You wanna be a king, then this is how you start. You get your house in order and you do what needs to be done."

Beth blinks at 'house' and tries to translate what he just said. She's quite certain he's not suggesting she needs to clean up all the broken and spilled stuff all over the floor that _he put there._ Because if that's what he's suggesting, she'll shove this bullet directly up his ass. "Get my house in order...?" she echoes uncertainly.

Rio nods his head at the back door, which Dean left hanging open. Beth spends a moment catching up on what isn't being said. "Chasing Dean off was getting my house in order. Okay, then."

"I mean, I woulda shot him for real."

"Yes, I know. You've made that abundantly clear; you're 'medieval'. But I operate differently."

"Between him and your little secret shopper problem that you say you 'handled', you're on track to have your dream of being a merciful gangsta blowing up in your face real soon. This is not a life where you get to have friends or get close to people, Elizabeth. Not if you're a boss. Bosses have lieutenants and footsoldiers. Business contacts. Enemies. Not friends and family."

She thinks about telling him how close the PTA is to what he's describing, but then thinks better of it. "All alone in your ivory tower, huh?" she prods him instead.

Rio grins lazily. "What can I say? It's lonely at the top."

Beth thinks about that, thinks that it sounds like there's a lot of personal space at the top. Solitude, even. She's not sure if she's ever really had solitude in her whole life. She thinks about her stolen alone-time in the bathroom a few days ago, how she had to leave the shower on to pretend she was showering instead of huddling on the floor. How her privacy had still been invaded anyway. Motherhood, in her experience, was decades of never being able to rely on a closed door staying closed.

Beth dreams of solitude more than she dreams of riches. She'd like to try being lonely (she doubts she could ever be alone long enough to start feeling lonely, but she's open to the possibility it could happen).

"I wouldn't exactly say I'm keeping Dean at 'friends and family' levels of closeness anymore. It's just about the kids being able to see him. And him being around to help with the damn childcare."

"So pay a fucking nanny. He's a liability."

"He's the father of my kids," she says helplessly. "Twenty years of marriage."

Rio raises an eyebrow at her. "All that shows is how long you can let a mistake dog you. He pissed away all your money, almost lost your damn house and kept _that_ a secret, he was running one side piece _that you know of_ , and now it sounds like he lied about having fuckin' cancer so you'd let him back in the house." He glances away for a beat and then locks eyes with her again. "He's a fucking _goof_."

Beth blinks. She's never heard an adult use that word as an insult, but Rio says it with so much venom that she chalks it up as another new vocabulary item. It sounds like it might be bad.

"Listen," she says, getting irritated with the subject, "Dean is not going to be a problem. He was _helping_ me, for God's sake. He wouldn't be helping me live a life of crime if he was planning to turn me in."

"Yeah," Rio drawls, "maybe. But that was before you pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger, and then told him to kick rocks. And he knows that _I'm_ still here, sitting in your home at all kinds of hours. All alone with you." He smooths his hands across the table and leans in, lowers his voice to a more intimate-sounding timbre. "Plus, there's that whole thing where you told the FBI we fucked on your kitchen table and all."

Beth is careful not to let her expression betray her.

It doesn't seem to matter to Rio. "There was lots of interesting details in that story you told them, about us. I could really... picture it."

Her mouth feels a little dry. "Well, when you want to sell a lie, it needs to have good window dressing."

"Or it needs to be a little bit true," he counters, giving her that infuriating smirk.

She looks away first. She's not proud of it. "All right," she says a bit too loudly, changing the subject, "so it seems like you're not going to kill me and I'm not going to kill Dean. Now what?"

Rio lets her escape his trap and leans back in his chair again. "You earn your way back into my good graces. You shut the fuck up and do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it, how I tell you to do it. You keep working on getting your house in order and doing what needs doing. Sometimes somebody getting capped is what needs doing and that's the way the game is played. You're gonna learn that sooner or later."

She senses that now is not the best time to start that fight all over again. "And then?"

Rio stands up and drifts past her toward the china cabinet where his gun is still lying. It's totally unnecessary to come as close to her as he does, and he pauses with his mouth beside her ear to answer her question in a voice so intimate-sounding that her spine tingles. "And then, Elizabeth, the day is gonna come where you need to get medieval and get yourself crowned King, since you want it bad enough."

She lingers a little on the idea and on the enticing smell of his aftershave. Rio retrieves his gun, ejects the magazine in a move that looks downright graceful, and then pulls out a fistful of bullets from his pocket to press back into the magazine. She watches him work, quick and sure, and hears the clicks of the springs as he presses each round into the loader. When he's done, he slides the magazine back inside the gun grip and tucks the gun away in his waistband against his lower back. It seems like he's about to leave, like they've said all the things that needed to be said tonight.

"Why do you keep calling me Elizabeth?" she asks, making him look up at her suddenly. "I've always been Beth. Only my grandma--who's dead now--and people who work for the government call me Elizabeth."

He studies her face for a moment and then steps in closer again, which is not what she was trying to achieve here. He doesn't get quite as close this time but all he'd have to do is lean in.... and then he says, "I ain't never gonna call you 'Beth'. That's a little girl's name. 'Beth' is some nerdy sixth grade girl with her hair in braids who reads all those fucking books about horses and shit."

Beth scratches at her eyebrow while she tries to process how well he just described herself as a preteen.

Rio isn't done, though. "You ain't no 'Beth'. No fucking way. _Elizabeth, that's_ a name for a woman. That's a power name. That's _royalty_ , sis. If you wanna hustle--and I know you do--and you wanna run the game and be the queen--if you wanna be the _king_ \--you let your name walk into the room ahead of the rest of you. Ain't no Desperate Housewife who tells people to call her 'Beth' ever gonna rule Detroit. Not in our lifetime."

Beth sits back as she tries to absorb all that. She kind of feels it settle over her like a mantle. She likes the sound of what Rio's saying. A tiny, quiet, far-back corner of her mind yells out a warning that the rest of her ignores, about the danger in liking the sound of what's said by a man whose hustles have hustles.

But she understands, she thinks, on a gut level, what he's telling her and it makes sense.

Beth has four kids and a treadmill in the basement. Beth makes cupcakes and runs PTA meetings.

 _Elizabeth_ is a persona with reach, an empire. Elizabeth makes deals and runs game.

Rio is smirking at her again, in a way that suggests he knows exactly what she's thinking right now.

"I'll be in touch," he says, leaving her sitting on the table in her trashed and slightly bloodstained dining room as he melts back into the darkness he came from.

She opens her right hand and looks down at the bullet still cradled in her palm. The one she never fired.

 

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> Rio uses the insult "goof" in this fic. That word is specifically Canadian prison slang, to my knowledge, and I don't know how far it's spread in the U.S. despite its age and notoriety up here, but if Rio has hookups in Windsor then he'll have learned it for sure, because it's ubiquitously known as ~the ultimate insult~ and people who have been inside will go right over a table at someone who calls them that. This is my justification for exercising my artistic licence to use that word.


End file.
